Year 2004
Year started not well. In February I had a very bad car accident, 6 ribs broken, squashed lungs. Due to various aspects of this event, I put it into a separate STORY.
Fortunately, the accident motivated me to hard work. I treated it as a challenge, to recover quickly to previous level of fitness. In first days of April, I did together with Michael a 15 hours rogaine. I had to be careful with any jumps and avoid falls, otherwise it was OK. Month later, I participated in Puffing Billy run. It was lots of fun. 3 weeks later I started in a Run to the G, quite memorable event, which also deserved a separate chapter.
Winter came, I managed to ski 6 times in Lake Mountain and 5 times in Falls Creek before the races. In the meantime, we had our private Hotham to Falls tour. Snow and weather conditions were excellent, maybe even too good as deep snow slowed us considerably and we reached Falls Creek quite exhausted.
There were also important developments in the family. On 8th of August, Felix was born to Sarah and Michael. Ania could not join us in Hotham to Falls as she was pregnant, her turn came on 22nd of November - Sabina was born.
Understandable, that I was the only participant from our family. Weather was great, race on the proper course. I completed in reasonable time 3:38. Quite satisfactory considering all circumstances.
There was one more issue, in August I lost my job. For a while I had doubts if I can still find a job at all. Odds looked not good - age 63, for last 7 years no update of my professional qualifications (IT). But I found a job and to make my success sweeter I was employed by Infosys, large Indian owned IT company, which was notorious for exporting jobs from Australia and many other countries to Bangalore in India. And here they brought a job for me :)))
To celebrate, before starting this job, I made a 1 week tour of Flinders Ranges and then Great Victorian Bike Ride. It looked as the great year despite the bad beginning.
